How To Be Relentlessly Happy

Relentlessly Middle.

2009-12-04T18:46:00.000-08:00

For most of my life, I can’t say I was happy, or very interested in being happy. A childhood characterized by despair and anxiety, led predictably to an upswing in shallow adolescent self-confidence, more arrogance than anything else. Like millions of others, there I was.

I could have stayed there forever, half-comfortable in the half-crouch, defensiveness-with-a-smile

most people know and do well, and which is currently everywhere in our culture. Call it the human default mood. Snarky, concerned with being right and staying above criticism. Very, very lonely.

It’s suspect to aim for anything better, lazy to demonstrate anything worse. Even if it would be infinitely more authentic, showing up too perky for work is exactly as off-putting to people as showing up endlessly upset about yourself and the world around you.

Whenever the circumstances of life felt overwhelming to me, I focused on survival. When they weren’t, life seemed to come in pre-determined states; one day would be “vaguely alienated day”, another might be “aggravated and castrated”, and of course there was always “day as catalog of depressive states”.

Slipping into an easy and jovial suspicion of happiness-as-goal unto itself, it was the easiest thing to do to harshly judge a happy life from a safe and comfortable distance from it. Doing exactly that seemed to be something I was good at, that I noticed many other people were also pretty good at. The message I seemed to have absorbed from my community, in the just-try-to-survive path I set out for myself was, “Don’t ever be too happy. Or too sad”.

This was the get-ahead path, the popular way with the people and authority figures around me. From them, I sensed either a palpable apathy or a mild-though-invisible fear. I heard one resounding directive -in a thousand different ways, and that was: “Aim for the middle” and get comfortable there.

Or, if not exactly the middle, some point not too far north of it.

I don’t mean the financial middle, or the social status middle, those ladders are easy enough to scurry up and down, and at least doing so is a fairly straightforward process, if you make an outright goal of it. And many people do, and still end up in the middle. By which I mean the mood-middle.

Not terribly happy, not suicidally depressed yet either.

Real happiness, like real success, like real hope, like real satisfaction, glimmered in the tantalizing distance, and stayed there--a condition of other conditions. A result of many other things which were themselves mysterious, intangible, constantly changing in their requirements, and always, always pending. What was most painful about real happiness, was how pending it always seemed. Happiness; like a friend lost in a maze that I could hear in the distance, but who was always not just in another room, but on another floor.

It couldn’t be happiness if it was a now and forever thing. Oh sure one might catch hold of something sublime for a second, (that wasn’t special either but could happen to anyone, the very definition of dumb-luck). What I was to understand from such occasions above all, was that I shouldn’t expect much from these moments of transcendence. They were dreams. And I knew what the world made of dreams, confetti. Still I kept a bright bit of it and waited.

If I did have some “dumb” luck befall me, the event was characterized by myself and others as almost accidental, literally the oddly-chaotic grace of God. Like a free ice-cream cone, better enjoy it while it lasted, because we’re talking about a matter of minutes. Equivalent to the duration of a song, a cigarette, an orgasm. I call it “ the smile from the King”, it’s exactly that fleeting, exactly that rare. The amount of time a kind comment from someone you liked still wafted in the air. Just as fast and it’s over. And then you’re to be back at it: the other ninety percent of life, which was meant to be misery or toil. Pray not both.

And from this mindset, so gray, so limited, we collectively create the world.

It was at these times, when I was being asked to relinquish a happy moment, that I seemed to surrender it unwillingly, and as it went out of my grasp, my so smart-self would do what we all have done and do, which is to idealize and construct and build shrines to our someday-happiness. Out of terror or fear, in dreamy-boredom, with a vague gnawing -we all think the same thing, in what amounts to one of the biggest lies a majority of humans still commonly believe and hold true: that our someday happiness would one day arrive, like a comet in the sky, dazzling in its effects, but just an obvious side-effect of all the other great things that our future lives will of course include. It turns out the sum total of our logic surrounding happiness can largely be described as, “We will be happy in the future, because we will be happy in the future”.

And though I can understand why I invested so deeply, so frequently and intensely in someday-happiness, I no longer agree it was very smart to do so.

And so on to my someday-life, and every thing it contained! If there was an outward representation of it, it would depict everything anyone would expect, you would see all the usual things, and not one unusual thing, the very picture of what a wildly successful life looks like to most people. Except of course all with my own amazing twist of personal uniqueness. Though I had no idea what that even meant specifically.

Here is the pact I made with the Universe, it might sound familiar: If I could hold onto a disciplined frame of mind, If I did all the work, and was careful about it, took all the steps, and made my way toward my goals in a direct and orderly fashion, if I thought positively, (positive thinking was of course key) if I did all of this, as often as possible, well then, my life, if not the world, would of course soon become an enviable paradise. Why? Because it was logical. Because getting ahead is what you’re supposed to want to do. And it was never confusing what “getting ahead” was, or meant. And being successful would make me happy. A happy satisfied life is of course about achievement and material things. Right?

It was all going to be so great. Oh, it was going to be quite the party, my life. When I graduated, when I finally traveled, when my kids were born, when they would grow up and love me, when they left and appreciated me more, when I had a romantic partner, when my romantic partner finally changed every one of their many annoying habits, when my parents would come visit, when they finally left, when I got that raise, when I didn’t have a job, when I had better toys, a new phone, a new car, when all my possessions were organized, when I didn’t have so much stuff, when I lost weight, and gained muscle.

To do lists, after to do lists, after to do lists. I get exhausted just thinking about them now. But I was clear: after I got everything on every to-do list done, and took a vacation and then bought myself a fun, new and expensive toy, then I would consent to be ---at last happy. I’d climb up a ladder into the sky never to be seen again. It was all so achievable, just work endlessly hard, and get the results, that it couldn’t help but happen.

Unless it wasn’t going to.

What then?

Doubts? Doubts are one of the main features of pending happiness and someday-happiness.

The very things I needed to do to get ahead, were all directly at odds with what was actually going on around me. Seeing violence, the willful destruction of an innocent persons psyche, and extreme abuse at an early age, again and again meant that for me organizing myself, disciplining myself, positive thinking, staying focused, were all the last things I wanted to do- which was to be violent, cry, or give up completely. It is not said enough though, that whether or not one has had a traumatic beginning to life on Earth, there are many people who would be perfectly justified in having a vividly angry reaction to waking up having to face another day.

Like a lot of other people I didn’t grow up or live in a vacuum or lab. I couldn’t just turn on my uplifting thoughts with the pleasant absence of the many other factors that might inspire just the opposite.

This situation of my early life was searingly painful and only getting worse as I got older. How do you think positively when life is asking everything of you all the time, but not living up to its own few, basic guarantees? When is that ever going to feel authentic? How could I feel all my feelings which I wanted to do so badly, and still make a bridge to a new world, where I didn’t have to feel those harsh feelings anymore, and be authentic about it? When you adjust your expectations lower and lower and are still disappointed and heartbroken that your good thoughts and hard efforts have come to nothing, what do you think you could reasonably expect of life anymore? And of your own solid efforts to make progress and be happy?

And how is a car or a job or a new love ever, ever going to make up for it?

by Troy Ygnacio Soriano

Copy Edit
Draft Copy
2009/2010

Happiness Vigilante.

2009-09-27T04:31:00.000-07:00

HOW TO BE RELENTLESSLY HAPPY

BY TROY YGNACIO SORIANO.

What returns from oblivion

Returns to find a voice.

-Louise Gluck

Only someone who has been truly miserable, often, could write a book about being relentlessly happy.

Perhaps only someone who has been would want to. I may be the most qualified person to write about happiness, in this particular way, because I believe myself to have been among the most lost and despairing -and have made my way through it repeatedly.

At first, only barely, and quite roughly. And then quicker, and more easily, and then quicker still, and more easily still.

Through a series of quite-startling events which only should have made me distinctly less happy, not only would I get through my sad or down states, their intensity began to shift and lessen, and their nature changed completely, so that eventually I had to admit these were now happy states, or so near happiness that the variance was negligible.

It didn’t happen right away, and I needed help, but one day, I made one or two really good decisions, and then, quite by chance, one or two more. And this continued for a time, unabated. I began putting actions and ideas together and noting the results. Not just the small, immediate effects but the bigger, longer-term ones. I had been very nearly a professionally angry and depressed person, and no traditional therapies had worked, so these were no small results to me.

I began to trust my decisions. And it was then, when my trust in myself was really established, that the whole thing broke wide open.

Soon, I would catch myself laughing for no reason, others would ask me what was going on. What exactly does one say-- “Oh. Don’t mind me. I am in the process of becoming a happy person”? That even saying such a thing aloud would be judged as odd, or even crazy, is deeply unfortunate, we need more happiness-pride and much less happiness-shame.

What was going on, was my sadness was approaching me more half-heartedly, and departing with more alacrity. And when the dark spells did depart- the remaining contentment I was left with felt ever more solidly my own. And what is your own, is yours to share. No going back, the peanut-butter had melded with the chocolate now, and there’d be no separating them. I started to sense that happiness had established a permanent base in my soul. Comfy.

I was slowly becoming an expert in feeling good. Not out of a denial or a shame of feeling badly, but out of a genuine, ever-increasing surety that life was simply amazing.

The good feeling I had seemed to expand outwards from me, to affect and influence almost every aspect of life, and the people I encountered in it. And then they began to change, too. I began to meet a lot of new people, and they were happier people, or people just about to be.

Joyful sets of circumstances came my way, with little effort. When one good option disappeared, three new ones stood ready to take its place. When nothing good seemed to offer itself, I closed my eyes and smiling, took what life offered me, in trust-actual trust, something I had never known before, to have it turn out to be the best outcome of all. Sometimes it’s only when your car breaks down, when the bus you get on breaks down too, that, walking alone on a cold and dark road, that you are finally in a position to meet the one person in the world you need to meet the most. And they, you. Oh yes-they need to meet you just as desperately.

But if I was taking careful notes of how and why this happened, it wasn't for any ones sake but my own.

I hated feeling down and spent years that way. Often I openly and actively didn't want to be, but there didn't seem to be much I could do about it. The world was just very terrible, or I was. Likely both.

I could take action toward my sadness, but eventually there it was again, standing there, a towering figure in the doorway. Like an old friend who knew more about me than I did. And it would take so little; a song, some inflection in something someone said, persistent weather states, toxic nostalgia, looking in the mirror even sometimes would do it, and there I’d go, down.

Who knows how long I’d be down there. In some parallel universe I’m probably

still down there. But not this one, not anymore. And if there’s a continuous disco party going on in my head nowadays, trust me, I’m just as surprised as anyone. But who am I to resist one more dance?

The transformative nature of simply being happy is powerfully underestimated in our culture, and radically undervalued. In many ways we have become used to a certain level of existential misery, but why? Like all kinds of prejudice and injustice, it is finally time to look deeply into what we can do to make our next important evolutionary shift, and that is to me, to claim our time on earth more fully, and to dedicate it to something larger than the shallow identities we sometimes struggle with, to embrace a much larger identity based on who we really are in our deepest soul.

This book is about the radical idea that the level of happiness in your life is too valuable and important to leave to chance. The most valuable human commodity in my view is time, it is the one thing which is less every second, for everyone on Earth. And though a lot of things in your life should have the surprise of discovery, finding out you’ve accidentally lived a miserable life for ten or twenty years should not be one of them.

For that we should be willing to look at everything-particularly the romantic overlay we give our reality, by which I mean our faith that the things of this world will fulfill us deeply forever. This alone has hundreds, maybe thousands of expressions for each of us in our daily lives. We have made a bad habit of the rush to comfort. But comfort is not what we truly seek, we seek soul-fulfillment! That is very different. The romantic overlay we give our reality needs to battle with our actual reality, and from that assessment we need to walk away finding our actual reality even more romantic. That is what happened to me, and this book is the account of it.

In some way, it’s already happening-a new regard for how our lives are being spent. Everywhere I see the evidence of it: the time has finally come for a majority of people to live deeply happy lives, who were not living them before. Through a change of emphasis, redirected goals, a broadening of an outlook. It starts from within, the inner-voice, so quiet at first, speaking with an undeniable appeal. It's a trilling, tickling, lighthearted and friendly voice, with all of the best ideas. Call it the directive of real happiness, not happiness as joke or punch line, it’s an end to highs and lows.

I don’t just mean for the people who were obviously supposed to be happy: those born with no serious issues or problems, who never encountered any, who never did come up against much adversity and who aren’t too curious about what it’s like. I mean the opposite: huge swaths of people of every kind of background and beginning, who have seen a little too much of every kind of adversity, and have almost forgotten what life was like without it, I especially call out to them.

There are no lost causes. No one is in too dire of a situation. Let no one be the victim of a sort of happiness-prejudice. There is no person, for whom happiness would be inappropriate. In this world, the wide gulf in happiness-as-wealth is even more glaring than certain financial disparities, and about a thousand times as needless. Let us change that now, and let the doing of it be part of what we call happiness.

To those that say finding happiness is like finding love, that you can't wish or work for it, you have to just let it happen I say that finding happiness is not exactly like finding love. Finding happiness is much more important than any other goal. You may or may not meet the love of your life today (I think you may!) but a happy life is not something we can spend a single second more denying ourselves. It is a great responsibility both personally and in the world, to make ourselves as happy as we want to be, with tremendous positive implications the likes of which we can only barely imagine now.

Excuse me for stating the obvious but the situation is that urgent that I will; happy people do not kill, rape, or maim. They don’t even gossip. Happy people do not tear each other down, they are not racist, they don’t hurt others actively or passively. Far from that, happy people don’t even mind if you take the parking space they were waiting for. And they certainly don’t yell for hours over the kitchen table with relatives about politics! To put it in the simplest terms, happiness gets more done, in less time, and with better results. What is not said often enough is that happiness includes many other skill-sets automatically, and these skills are ours to fully possess at any time of our choosing. We’d do very right by the world to make ourselves happy. It is a state luminous with justice and wisdom. It is a very high calling, one that is open to anyone, money or position very much not required. It is noble, and it is active, and there isn’t a whit about it that is dismissible.

This book will not make light of profound sadness and doesn't aim to cover it up with flowery or sugary aphorisms. In fact, though I consider myself a strong happiness-advocate, I would be averse to doing that.

I actually respect sadness and am fascinated by it, in a strange way it is perhaps this above all that allows me to know it's opposite so well. When you know every feature of a thing, and don’t hate it anymore, but are merely ready to go beyond it, when the level of curiosity to do so is powerfully stoked, and you are absolutely ready to do what it takes to make some progress, you start to open to the possibility of knowing what is beyond the borders of sadness.

It is surprisingly a lot. Joy is so much bigger and more comfortable to us than sadness. It is so much more us!

Sadness itself will not disappear, nor is it required to. Sadness is just like a land that you leave. You’ve been there too long, and may have forgotten how to. And I’m just the person who, telling you to go grab your passport says, “I notice we’ve got a stamp for this place already, and we’ve been here awhile, and since we aren’t doing much, why don’t we leave? How about that direction!”

It’s sunny over there.

Yes, you will hear that the world didn't set out to be a happy place, maybe the world didn't set out to be a lot of things it is. We’re not asking the world to change, now. We, the people who wish to be happy, merely note that if we can make our lives much worse by our decisions, it is our perfect right to arrest them from a wayward course, to pick them up, as if something on the ground, and place them in a bright place, too. And we do so by making better, very clever and creative, very different, and yes sometime odd choices, too.

Grab the moment, try something new, don’t let go until you have tried something. All you need to set upon a new path is an instant, a lifetime after all, is a parade of nows. A happy life is literally many healthful decisions.

I’m not talking about the body here. It is not said enough that a happy body is not necessarily a super-fit body, and happiness is not only for one kind of body, or for waiting for this or that to be perfect as others judge it.

This isn’t about the acquiring of any things, it is about claiming a state. If you want to get your doctorate in something, that is tremendous, but here I’ll be urging you to get your doctorate in peace-making, self-care, every day romance, and being silly, and that is actually much more important and overdue. Actually it is so important that not doing so is hurting you. It’s the resolute statement that you can lose or gain the world, and over a lifetime you can expect to and will, but at the end of the day, what you’ve lost, gained, and lost again, has absolutely nothing to do with who you are.

When I was almost done writing of this book, I found, quite by chance, a note I had written to myself thirteen years ago, when I was 24.

I remembered it instantly. I wrote it at a time in my life when it seemed like everyone was constantly criticizing me and when I always felt alone, hostile, and alienated. It was a time when often I couldn't leave the house because I had such bad anxiety. And when I didn't feel so anxious a cold sweat was literally running down my face, my impulse toward explosive, maniacal anger would overwhelm me.

I judged everyone I saw as either far better or far worse than I was, and I was filled with wild, uncontrollable lusts. I was someone hard for me to imagine now, a person completely controlled by fear. I was so afraid, and I was so angry. And though I didn't know it at the time, things were about to get about twenty times worse.

I am 37 now and had not seen the note since the day that I wrote it. Unfolding it as if I was tenderly opening a flower, I brought it toward my face with curiosity and delight, as the sun came in, over my shoulder, to light up the note perfectly.

It said, simply, "Fuck it. I'm going to be happy today".

More scrawled than written, it was also underlined.

An eight-word poem, it could have been my eight-word biography. A single sentence as the summation of my entire life, even encompassing that exact moment of standing there, being 37. It was one perfectly angry, determined, joyous declaration. A letter to myself, a message in a bottle, for me to find one day. Something to destroy and remake me the instant I found it again. And how wonderful that I did find it again, tucked in a small forgotten book, in a friends house, in a high-up corner, on the other side of the world from where I originally wrote the note, in a house I was living in, while I was actively engaged in writing a book on: happiness. But there it was.

Who was that guy, fifteen years back? And who was I now? What the hell happened?

I sat down, smiling at myself. First, I couldn't stop laughing, then I couldn't stop crying. I loved that note. My soul expanded, and touched each year of my past and all of the people I had met, with simple affection. Everything good and bad that happened over the years, began to have the same taste.

Nothing ever felt so obviously earned, nothing ever felt as flagrantly in my possession, as my happiness, then. And I could have died at that moment, thanking every single person on my way out, just for the experience of living my life. I blessed and received blessings from every place I went, every room I ever stood in, every speck of dust, as humility and grace fell upon me, conquered me with charm, subsumed me and lifted me up, before placing me again, gently, in a sun-filled room, in San Francisco.

This wasn't just some old note I found, written in ball point pen. This was a bold little flag I had there in my hands. If flags were indeed still things travelers sent up tall posts, on ships bound for far-off places.

2009 Draft Copy

Author: Troy Ygnacio Soriano

This post on Facebook.

What I've learned (so far) from San Francisco by Troy Ygnacio Soriano.

2009-09-08T13:42:00.001-07:00

As part of writing my new book "How To Be Relentlessly Happy", I wrote this list on my favorite city of the moment, San Francisco.

I was a pretty laid back and non-judgmental when I got to San Francisco. I've become even more laid-back in San Francisco, and even less judgmental. There are many people leading extremely happy lives here.

Here's some of what I learned from them.

-TYS

What I've learned (so far) from San Francisco.

1. The families you join are at least as important as the families you born into.

The idea of advocacy is not abstract here. From some of the best child-advocacy programs in the world, to a civic-minded people who you can only describe as electrified, people join here as if their fortunes are tied to each other, take to the streets when they are pissed off automatically, and are arm-in-arm. Food not bombs has nightly meals for the homeless or just anyone who wants to join up. There are new economy models where people meet up to trade and barter, the Free Skool in Berkeley, and an online site for trading items, and public spaces dedicated to urban farming unlike anything I've ever seen.

Socially, politically and economically --I'm up close and personal, and I've never seen people take each others well-being so much to heart. You almost wonder what it means to them, and I suspect there are many answers to that .. but it's wonderful to see, and even better to be a part of.

You could walk up to any group in any park and just sit down and talk, and I do. I've never seen that before.

2.The last place art should be is inside a building with a high admittance fee.

All day long I see tourists taking pictures of paintings. But they aren't in any museum.

San Francisco has more public murals and graffiti style works than any city I've seen --by far. It's practically a point of pride that gets listed in tourist brochures. The city finally stopped fighting the artists and simply decided to sponsor them. Or at least let them live and breathe.

Hence, a city where you can walk from one corner of the town the other without ever being out of the sight-line of some art. And if the paintings aren't on the walls, they're on the sidewalks. Something for those that can't raise their eyes.

3. What you call impossible someone else is doing and succeeding at.

I'll never forget the day I met someone selling hand-painted socks on the beach. How much do you make a year?" I boldly asked. I couldn't believe she possibly sustained herself this way.. She replied breezily .. "Oh probably near .. 30 thousand .. that's it .. " she said laughing. A good amount to some, not enough to many others, but I noticed *the smile*. That smile said a lot. She changed my mind forever about striking out on your own.

4. Be part of the Critical Mass.

The bikes-not-cars advocacy group Critical Mass is getting bigger every day ... and larger here than any other city. When the people on bikes take over, it's much funner to be in the streets than watching on the side-lines. When the gay marriage advocates take to the street, you don't want to be on the sidewalks. Get waist deep in the party, be a part of the moment, feel alive. Life is short feel alive.

5. Perfection is boring.

San Francisco has taught me repeatedly that costumes aren't for holidays they are for every day. Pretty is kind of ugly and ugly is kind of pretty. The homecoming queen looks more interesting if she rolls around in the mud a little and is holding a knife. The homecoming king should be in a tutu, or at least a kilt. Archetypes exist to be messed with, not taken seriously. Here, meet a cop that smokes pot.

6.Getting older is good. Getting odder is better.

This is one town that seems to really celebrate people who don't look like models in magazines. And that is far more interesting to be in all day than some other places I've been. I've never seen older people having so much fun as they do here, it almost makes you wish you were sixty and not 37. When you come across some guy in his bathrobe in the fog on the beach who's drunk on wine and smoking a cigar you know someone in the world is doing what they want to do.

7. Be outside A LOT more.

I've never seen people take the open air as much as here. People of all classes and backgrounds actually USE their parks and green-spaces and beaches. They are swarmed all over them. And though they might live in a beautiful Victorian, you get the feeling they never want to go inside.

8. AM and PM are concepts that are fucking with you. Fuck back.

Doing your cardio in other places might mean forty-five minutes during lunch on the treadmill. Doing it here means a fun-run at midnight in a jockstrap or full drag. And people would join you. Don’t let the hours of the day bully you.

9. Your culture is not the only culture.

Exotic somewhere else might mean some spicy Szechuan take-out. Here you could eat with Ethiopians in their own home. For every interesting culture, there are millions of others. Don’t just go to the next easiest one. Seek out the unsought out.

10. The world will reward you for the interest you show in the world.

There are worlds upon worlds in a city as multi-layered as San Francisco. If your range of interest is very limited then you probably will miss out on a hell of a lot of it.

11. A European pace of life is possible in the States.

If you show up on time for things people might think you don't have a life.

12. Don't be shy. You're not fooling anyone.

If you don't do any new things how can you think any new thoughts? Experiment. Don’t have a limited sense of yourself. It’s suicide, and not as quick.

13. Right and wrong are not particularly helpful.

The world is more complex than the stories we tell children. Seeing the world as wonderfully complex is a greater responsibility than painting it up in black and white. Always some good comes from evil, and some evil comes from good. The person who sets out to destroy another just might be accidentally giving him all the tools he needs to succeed.

The ending is always, ALWAYS a surprise, to everyone, and it's all very much out of your control.

14. There's no schedule for perfection.

These can't co-exist. Notice how whenever someone envisions paradise it's in a place with no schedule?

15. Just figure it out.

The time you spend fussing and worrying you can be figuring it out and making it happen. The recipe is simple, involve other people, then invite the Divine ...

16. Dream the boldest dream first.

Why brew your own Kombucha when you can brew your own chocolate-marijuana-raspberry-infused Kombucha?

The market elsewhere might be for the odd and unique thing. Here, it’s for the even odder, even more unique thing. You gotta love that. There’s gotta be at least one place in the world for that, and I wanna live there.

17. Indulge your soapbox. It DOES have an effect.

The funny thing about expressing yourself is, you can get really used to it. And someone out there might really benefit from hearing you. Your point of view is a symbol of help to someone. At the very least you might make some like-minded friends. Step up, don't hold back and share.

18. Road trip. A lot.

The only thing better than living in an interesting place is living in an interesting place that is right next to twenty other interesting places.

19. Whatever you are doing. It would probably be better naked.

From Bay-to-Breakers to Baker Beach, you just can't keep clothes on these people.

And once you get used to it, well .. clothes are awfully stifling. Something about the chemicals they are soaked in.

20. Every once in awhile. Just stop everything and party.

Maybe it's the earthquakes, the intrusion of something elemental .. what one person referred to as "our surprise parties". But about once a week you'll notice that someone stops traffic and plays a song. You can choose to be annoyed and roll your eyes. Or you can roll with it and enjoy. Move to Montana if you can’t handle it.

21. There's ALWAYS a celebration going on somewhere. (hear that far off music?)

Earthfest, Folsom, Eat Real, party at Stern Grove, Castro Street Fair, Lazy Bear, on and on .. whoever you are, whatever you are, Pride isn't a weekend, or even a state of mind. It's a festival going on this minute, don’t miss it. And if you do sit this one out, party in private.

22. Exercise all the heavy food feelings away. (You don't need to be in the mountains to hike.)

Ever seen how vertical San Francisco can get? Go ahead have that slice of chocolate cake, we're climbing up Duboce past Castro.

23. Don't set limits on yourself.

Whatever it is, whether starting a small business or trying something new. Just go on the journey for the hell of it. The only true journey is one with NO destination.

If you know where you’re going then it’s a trip. Don’t trip.

24. Judgmental attitudes and morality probably have a place somewhere. Sex ain't one of them.

Between consenting adults, why not see what is possible? Why not explore the outer limits of what is possible? When we are busy customizing everything we CAN, why settle for a sex life that is pre-packaged by others and handed to us in a plain white box? Dice it up, put it on wheels, plug it into the socket and hang it upside down.

Shake gently.

24. And gender is the biggest lie.

I see men dressed as women driving buses, working in restaurants, all over. Some are trying hard to "look like women", some are fully-rocking a mustache with that mini-skirt. (See #5)

Women are everywhere here in a suit and tie look, or work clothes, Brill-crème Don Draper’s as cute and capable as handsome men. They want to live that way and they do. Far beyond styles of dress, many people are un-burdening themselves of stifling and outmoded gender roles here, and that is very freeing to see. It takes a lot of courage to live your dream, when the world is smoggy with fears and restrictions and limits.

These people are breaking through.

There are those who got other things from San Francisco but this is my experience of it.

I salute you, Bay-Area California, for showing me what is possible.

For teaching me, for helping me.

This post on Facebook

-TyS.

"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree." MLK.

2009-09-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

You can actually hear it coming if you listen.

2009-09-06T12:49:00.000-07:00

We can only go forward together.

2009-09-06T12:47:00.000-07:00

Experience yourself as your own source.

2009-09-03T20:27:00.000-07:00

I was walking to Alamo Square park a week ago, when I heard this wonderful jazz music all around me. I looked to my left and there were about forty people quickly assembling around this garage full of art and music. Fascinated, enthusiastic people.

Then, just as quickly, the song was over and all forty people dispersed.

When it did, this smiling man was standing there. I told him I was doing a blog about being happy.

He got it. He was it.

What I especially loved was that he wasn't waiting for his dream to come true, he wasn't waiting for someone to come and say "yes, spend your life doing your dream and here is a fortune to do it." He was adjusting his life so that he could live his dream, in real time, with absolutely no one's permission and to everyone's benefit and joy. It's joy, shared, in real terms.

And that is the Charles Unger Experience.

Relentless!

http://www.charlesungerexperience.com

This is not our last goodbye.

2009-09-02T17:19:00.000-07:00

I found these shoes filled with flowers and plants arranged artfully in Alamo Square park in San Francisco. They are superfluous and serve no direct purpose whatsoever. And yet they are absolutely vital.

Which one is happier?

2009-09-02T16:01:00.000-07:00

We're about the same.

Nothing real can be threatened.

2009-08-21T17:31:00.000-07:00

Are you a contender?

2009-08-14T10:20:00.000-07:00

Introducing the one blog that isn't about me. Why? Because I'm already happy. This is about you. You're not happy, but you want to be. I think you can be. And I know that together we can get there. There should be a lot more people happy, than are. Isn't that true? So let it all happen, let there be a great release. Are you a candidate? Are you a contender? Do you think it's about time?

I do too.